Super Freak
by The USS Ficcelsior
Summary: I ship Anne and Futaba. Weirdly.
1. To Skin a Cat

CATS HAVE A HEIGHTENED SENSE OF SMELL THAT CAN WARN THEM OF IMMINENT DANGER. Unfortunately, Panther wasn't a real cat. She just dressed up like one for her nightly dose of espionage.

The Palace's Demon guards came at her as a horde, but this wasn't anything she hadn't planned for. Cracking her whip here, delivering a flying kick there, she slipped through their defenses with relative ease. She was going to be remembered as the central figure in one of the greatest heists of all time.

Just not the one she was expecting.

Several rooftops away, someone was privately tracking Panther's actions. A black shape highlighted with green stripes and long, rust brown hair, Navi watched the fight break out in the crosshairs of her visor binoculars. Her headphones provided an ad hoc soundtrack for the scene, cycling through a playlist that included "Smooth Criminal" by Michael Jackson, "Unmei no Saki he" by Kei Yoshikawa, "Love Forever" by MCR, "Little Bitty Pretty One" by Thurston Harris, and the Antenna Cradle theme from Goldeneye.

Reconnaissance was Navi's main objective: Simply take pictures and report back to the Palace's rulers about who was disturbing the peace. The circuits of her mind were already starting to change currents, however. She could deal with a situation like this by herself. She was expecting to see on a mob uprising. Instead, all she found was one noisy kitten who had gotten out of her cage.

Navi licked her lips as she followed the target. Panther battled her way through the demons with grace, elegance, and a bit of 70s action movie swag. Navi had heard of the Woman in Red causing problems for the ones in charge, but this was the first time she had seen her in-person and up close.

If nothing else, Panther was the voluptuous sort. Her Phantom Thief attire consisted of bright, skintight red pleather that covered everything except the lower portion of her face, a window around her bosom, and the pair of blonde pigtails flailing from the back of her head. Navi, by comparison, was an ironing board in a black jumpsuit. Jealousy crept into her mind.

Navi zoomed in with her gloved thumb on the edge of her visor, taking snapshot after snapshot in a thorough geographic survey of Panther's body. Her thoughts wandered into the girls' locker room at Syujin High. She could recognize those curves even before she activated the bio-filter on her binoculars.

 _Heh. So much for the secret identity, Anne._

Futaba was close friends with Anne in her regular life. Or at least, she pretended to be. Things could get a little demented when the world went dark and you lived a dual life in a Demon-infested alternate dimension. Anne, ever the bold heroine, had apparently chosen to fight the system as Panther. Futaba, a studious proponent of order and logic, helped uphold the status quo as Navi.

Futaba tapped another button on her binoculars. The Demons instantly disappeared from her digital view of the world.

Along with all of Anne's clothes.

The visor's built-in sonar and electron imaging omitted all the unnecessary information, displaying Anne as a bare blonde-haired figure on a wireframe background. She was an artist delivering an exotic aerobics performance for an audience of one. No matter how quickly or suddenly she moved, all of her important parts were kept perky and firm under an invisible layer of red pleather.

Anne turned her back toward Futaba, pounced straight up, and curled into a front flip over the Demon she was fighting. A quick glimpse of peach petals reminded Futaba she had a job to do.

Futaba tapped in her coordinates and hit the silent alarm to summon a squadron of Perennion Demons—The most ecological way to rid the Palace of uninvited pests. A dozen or so additional blips appeared on her radar, moving in roughly from the north.

Futaba's screen updated a second later. On one side of her detailed overhead view of the palace, there was a blip quickly scurrying this way and that as a red "D" flashed over its position. Far away, on an opposite wall, there was a stationary blip marked with a green "R." Futaba's backup units were making their way in a straight line between the two targets.

The stiffs wouldn't care about things ended, just as long as this Phantom Thief business was resolved. Everything else was left up to Futaba's discretion.

Her clever, mischievous, and spicy discretion.

She considered things briefly before she picked the "R" option. She couldn't deny she was the trashier of the two.

Anne still hadn't sensed anything wrong, but Futaba could hear the rumbling coming up behind her vantage point. She was so excited about what was to come that she almost forgot the meds. The compound she injected into her neck was powerful enough that it put her half to sleep and take away her ability to feel pain, but mild enough to keep her brainwaves hopping.

They rose up behind Futaba like ravenous beasts. Each one was a senseless hybrid of robotic parts and plant life, like a grove of giant Venus fly traps that had been fused with a woodchipper in a horrible foresting accident.

They ate her feet first. Jagged teeth tore through the rubber soles of her boots and shredded the black leather around her ankles. The motorized blades deeper in the creatures' stomachs ground her body straight down to into red sand. Just before they reached her heart, she smiled.

Turbines started to move in bowels of the Perennions. Futaba's tiny pieces were drawn through a central stem inside each monster. Midway up, the particles reached a Y-joint in the cyber-creature's ventilation system. Had Anne been the one who was devoured, her ground up remains would have been drawn through the left tube and come to their final resting place in a plain black container labeled "OEM FERTILIZER," sharing the same grisly fate as countless other enemies of the Palace, and that would have been the end of this wondrous tale of perversion.

Futaba was one of the few cases where the meal was allowed to pass through the right tube, heading into a different cylinder that looked more like a charged battery. The Perennions together sung in an ominous electrical hum before they began to move toward their next target.

Panther was nearly through with the guards when the Perennions arrived. She sensed she had sprung a trap. Munchers weren't part of tonight's regular security detail.

Massive chrome flowers bloomed from each creature, revealing a grated air duct built into its pistil. Panther was about to strike one of the creatures with her whip when it sprayed her. She accidentally inhaled part of the vapor before she covered her mouth and dodged out of the way.

She thought the machines were trying to paralyze her with their toxins. Nobody wanted their dinner to be thrashing around on the table while they ate. She had no idea being devoured alive would have been a more merciful outcome compared to what awaited her.

The human conscious was nothing more than a series of repeating electrical currents. Those currents could travel through the tiniest molecules, just as long as the material was conductive enough, the electrons were condensed close enough together, and there was a clear path to hold the current. Once it was in vapor form, the charged particles that made up a person's identity could find a new home in any living brain they floated through.

And now a tiny hint of Navi's _Eau de Possessión_ was salaciously creeping into Panther's nostrils.

Panther flipped through the air to escape the first sparkling metal cloud, but the flowers pointed up like gun turrets and blinded her in an even thicker cloud. There was nothing she could do protect herself. Navi's spirit dust met Panther's synapses with more impact than an airborne Dodge Stealth colliding with a concrete wall doing 120.

Time stopped in middle of Anne's acrobatics. The feeling was more disorienting than it was painful. It was a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere at once, the sudden realization that you weren't the only person in your own mind. The last thing Anne was able to do under her own control was widen her eyes in terror.

Futaba finished the move for her, swooping to the ground and landing gracefully on one knee. On the outside, it all happened in a matter of seconds. It looked as if Anne had been hit with the first cloud, escaped that unharmed, disappeared briefly inside a second cloud, and came back out of that with a perfect landing, all with no indication that her soul had suffered a crippling blow somewhere in between.

The internal narrative, however, was a different story. If neurons had voices, Anne's would be screaming _"GET OUT OF MEEEEE!"_ right now. Futaba's would have replied with a simple but explicit _"Unf."_

The Perennions rustled over the ground until they formed a ring around Anne. Their optic units performed a mental scan to reveal Futaba was only 54.348% assimilated into Anne's mind. There was no question who was in control at that particular moment, but there was still plenty of work to be done. Futaba's fingers were already beginning to twitch in subtle rebellion.

Futaba shifted her legs and placed her hands forward. The red pleather creaked softly down her back as she stretched on all fours.

"Come on, boys," Futaba purred through Anne's lips. "Panther's been a bad kitty."

The Demons blanketed her in blast of hot steam, adding a dew-like sheen to her outfit. Futaba closed her eyes and sighed.

A carefully calculated spike in body temperature would get her blood pumping. The increased heartrate meant the cyber-pollen invading her brain would have an easier time dispersing through the rest of her body.

The Perennions took turns delivering their punishment on Anne. The odd ones in the ring would sprinkle more of Futaba's twinkling particles on her, then the even ones would blast more heat from their bellows. She would be seasoned with Futaba some more, than simmered in thick steam. Half were responsible for monitoring the wavelengths that compared her Anne-ness to her Futaba-ness, the other half watched out for her thermal readings. They updated their scans by the millisecond, obsessively inspecting the prisoner like a sci-fi version of Javert.

The trip through the girlwash ruined Panther/Navi's catsuit. All that extra moisture would dry off, certainly, but the microscopic flecks of metal and nanotransistors that now soaked deep into its fibers would make it light up like Akihabara on Christmas Eve even on the most basic security systems. Its days as practical stealth attire were over.

But that was okay. Anne had had a good run with it, not counting its less than dignified end, and Futaba figured it was about time to exchange it for something in black and neon green.

The machines were almost ready to put the finishing touches on their captured Phantom Thief. On the outside, she was drenched in a half-and-half mixture of Anne's fresh sweat and Futaba's artificially preserved corpse-wax. On the inside, her assimilation rate hovered somewhere around 94%.

The tip of her tongue slipped over her bottom lip as she panted ever so quietly. A small reservoir of moisture had formed in the smooth dip of her cleavage. In thermal vision, she was rendered as a white hot fire pixie taking a breather after a long flight. Raising her body temp any higher would push her beyond the safe human tolerance.

The Perennion directly in front of Futaba made a motion like it was growing out of the ground, revealing a hollow space between its "roots." The underside—just visible from Futaba's crouched eye level—was lined with a sophisticated garden of leaf-shaped electromagnets and scrubbing pads.

The Demon rolled forward like a tank, adjusting its equipment to Futaba's personal width. Brushing over her, the leaves guided the particles in her bloodstream to make one final comprehensive sweep through her body, starting from the back of her head all the way down to her heels. Futaba positioned her herself to maximize the machine's effects. She had her chin to the ground and her hips straight up in the air when it started on her head, crawled back on all fours when it was near the halfway point of her spine, and sat up on her hands and stretched her pelvis to the ground when it caressed her lower back.

Futaba found this to be delightfully refreshing, like a gentle message after a long day in the sauna. Anne—in the last moments before her fleeting existence was rinsed away—didn't have enough of a free will to disagree. The mental takeover peaked at 100% by the time the person-sweeper reached the back of her ankles.

The Perennion finished its slow pass, allowing Futaba to climb to her feet. The first thing she did was peel her red mask and carelessly toss it aside. Anne had always been concerned with hiding her identity inside the Palace. Futaba didn't share the same sentiment.

One of the Perennions tilted its cameras in front of her. Futaba was displayed in its optical processors with her arms crossed and a mixed look of confidence and seductiveness on her face. Her image pixelated, shifted through the entire spectrum of colors, and appeared for a few seconds as a faceless silhouette standing behind a grid of computer code. When the image returned to normal, a list of diagnostic results were displayed to her right.

 **PHYS—OK**

 **PSYCH—OK**

 **IDENT—OK[RECYC]**

The magic phrase "CONTAINMENT SUCCESS" appeared below Futaba's grinning face. The carnivorous plant abominations rumbled away in the same direction they had come.

Futaba tapped her stolen foot as she looked around with her stolen eyes. She started to think about how she should deal with those other Phantom Thieves.


	2. Hidden Fury

"That's it for you, you shitter."

Anne sneered through clenched teeth. Everything in front of her was drenched in the color of blood. The carnage reflected back at her in a bright glow, washing over her face like the fires of Hell. The world around her vibrated in the constant low, muffled throbbing of an apocalyptic earthquake. Her luscious pigtails flapped through the air as she giggled.

"What's gotten into Anne lately?" Ryuji asked, not knowing _something_ had literally gotten into her, violating her very existence and reducing her body to a mere shell.

"I don't know," the Protagonist scratched his head as he replied. "All she does is listen to techno music and play Splatoon all day."

Ryuji was standing just behind her, peering curiously over her right shoulder. The Protagonist leaned over her left. Anne was sitting in a sofa, cross-legged with her feet pulled all the way up to the cushion. Empty cans of Ecto-Cooler were piled around her like a throne of crushed aluminum skulls.

Her fingers curled greedily against her controller. The TV switched to the results screen.

A light tap on her shoulder caught her attention. She turned to see Ryuji saying something. All she heard was "Mmn nnm mmf?" inside the protective bubble of her headphones.

"Huh?" she asked, peeling one of the speakers a couple inches away from her ear.

"I said, aren't you worried about the math test tomorrow?" Ryuji repeated. "We haven't studied together in a week."

"Puh, differential equations," Anne snorted. "Amateur stuff."

She arrogantly snapped her headphone back in place and returned to her game.

Ryuji shrugged.

"It's probably just a phase," he suggested innocently. "Some girls are like that."

The Protagonist accepted this explanation with an anonymous nod. He found it a little strange when he spotted a stack of AP Calculus books poking out from the darkness of one of Anne's shelves, but maybe he just never noticed those before.


	3. The Final Infiltration

" _I am the law."_

 _-_ Karl Urban _, Dredd 3D_

" _When we're finished with him, he'll be the state of the art in criminal rehabilitation."_

\- Jon Polito, _Viper_

* * *

The inventory stamper beeped as it was pressed against a cushioned round surface. Futaba pulled the handheld device away and leaned close to make sure the barcode had transferred correctly. She lifted the tactical visor from her eyes and stored it on the back of her head, folding the lens so they pointed up like cat ears. She climbed back to her feet to study her craftsmanship.

The ornate carpeting of the Palace floor was complimented with a newly added layer of skin tone. The Phantom Thieves were collapsed around Futaba in a heap of relentless nudity. Five bare bodies were sprawled across the floor face-down, feet-up, or curled on their side in a vaguely circular layout, the way apples fall if you shake the base of the tree too hard. The only movements they made was their breathing as they slept.

It was supposed to be the final infiltration of the Palace, an ultimate victory for the Phantom Thieves and an end to corporate tyranny. The plan had gone perfectly when they found the entrance to the Palace Vault and overwrote the security system. It didn't go as well when the person everyone thought was Anne up until that moment said "Hey guys, wanna see something cool?" and instantly rendered them comatose.

Now they were crumpled on the floor. They were all dressed down for their birthdays, and the best part was nobody knew they were having one today. Each one had been tattooed with a permanent laser brand somewhere on their body to mark them under the Palace's jurisdiction. Joker was stamped on his neck. Skull was stamped in the dead center of his forehead. Fox's marker was on his right ankle. Queen's was over her right breast. Noir's was on the bottom of her left rear cheek.

If the team of Phantom Thieves had just faced their final boss battle, this would be their Game Over screen.

Futaba twirled the checkout scanner in her hand like she had seen in a Peter Weller movie she couldn't quite remember the name of. She hooked it into her equipment belt beside another set of devices that resembled metal catnip toys. The first was the rechargeable stun grenade that had incapacitated the entire team with a single ultra high intensity flash. The filter in Futaba's feedback goggles had made her the only one safe from the blast. The second tool had jammed the magic frequencies that maintained their Phantom Thief costumes and left them as they were now, looking like a graduation party that had gotten a little too hairy.

Futaba tapped her index finger to a hidden transponder in her ear.

"Special Agent Navi reporting," she said. "I'm dropping off the trash."

"All of them?" replied an anonymous voice over the mic.

"Mhm. Five delinquents wanted for thievery, trespassing, and conspiring against the Palace, all high priority," Futaba said. "I've got them stripped, tagged, and awaiting arrest. Their files say they've already been signed up for emergency Depersonalization."

This was a glorious day for the Palace that had been long in the making, and it had finally come thanks to Futaba's clever thinking and Anne's donated good looks. The intake forms for these especially dangerous Phantom Thieves had been filled out and placed in the waiting queue weeks ago. Now their punishment would be carried out to the fullest extent of Palace law.

"The wardens are on their way," said the voice. "Should we run the default installer for all of them, or are there any custom settings you would recommend?"

This was where things took their most sinister and authoritarian turn. Anne's sentencing had been slightly dignified in that her body had at least been assumed by another human being. The other Phantom Thieves were not going to get off so easily. Their identities would be sanitized from their bodies and replaced with cold, simple-minded artificial intelligence. They would become living computers fitted in stolen organic cases. All that would remain of their original lives would be a one-page record for each Thief with a small red message that read "CONVICTED – AUTO CORRECTIONAL" stamped to the end, securely locked away in a Palace cabinet. The ultimate form of justice; robbing low-life, selfish, detestable thieves of the one thing they valued above all the riches in the world: their own egos.

The Palace was only interested in procuring their bodies, as the flesh could be rehabilitated much more easily than the mind. Most of the other officers weren't as comfortable as Futaba when it came to giving up their own body so they could commandeer a lowly convict as their new permanent husk, necessitating the use of software that would overwrite a person's neural pulses and emulate a new identity to fill in the gaps. There was also the small issue that even an organization as strict and official as the Palace couldn't turn down the chance to load the meat wagon with a few choice cuts of beef that were seasoned with the powers of Phantom Thieves. The new, simplified, Palace-approved version of Joker could be safely guarded on a portable disc until he was ready to be slipped into the matching biological hard drive, just like the programmable versions of Skull, Noir, Fox, and Queen.

"Ugh. Heck if I care," Futaba grunted into her transponder. "Turn these dorks into janitors or explosives handlers if you want."

Her eyes trailed to Noir's helpless form lying closest to her feet. Futaba remembered some of the brighter times in her life since she became Anne, and certain friendships she had formed while working undercover. Futaba rarely felt regret over the things she did for her unsavory job, but this was turning into one of those moments.

"…but give Haru something nice to do. She's not cut out for that rough stuff," Futaba said on second thought. "Fill her in as a lobby receptionist, or maybe a vet technician for the Cerberus Division. She would have liked that." Futaba lowered her head in remorse, then stuck out her tongue at Noir's sleeping naked body.

"Confirmed. We've preloaded the runtime patterns for four Palace sentries and one Treasury assistant," said the voice. "Just make sure the produce stays fresh until it's bagged."

"Works for me. The flash I gave these guys should keep 'em out for a long time." Futaba stretched her latex-covered shoulders and purred.

The estimated time for Futaba's backup to arrive was 10 minutes. They were there in half that.

The Shadow "wardens" were a flock of floating incarceration drones that looked like VTOL ships crossed with giant crows. The smaller Shadows hovering in the air were known as Garderobes, named after an old French word that could be used to describe either the dressing room where actors went to change characters between scenes of a play, or a primitive castle toilet for nobles to relieve themselves of their refuse. It was said that these Shadows metaphorically performed the functions of both.

The largest Shadow, lowering its engines so it could perch flat on the ground, was named Noah.

Five Garderobes broke formation, hovered over each of the Thieves, and dropped rings of fabric sheets around their requisition assignments.

Now the Phantom Thieves had been reduced to sprawled out silhouettes illuminated behind anti-static curtains. Boys were surrounded in blue, girls in pink. Rings of light scanned up and down the curtains as a heavy cloud of conductive metal twinkled from within. The bodies of the Phantom Thieves were smothered in dense wireless signals, encoding each one with the simplest personality traits to give them a basic sense of individual purpose, and uploading them with initial training for their promising future careers. A combination of unfortunate technical limitations and rigorous security protocols hindered their ability to ever act fully human again.

Futaba watched the arraignment with her arms crossed and her foot tapping a steady beat. She waited as the minutes rolled by and the faint aroma of baked neurons and overheating quartz began to hang in the air. The amount of time it took to electronically bleach away the entire nervous system's old natural impulses and run a new, more efficient artificial current through the same wiring varied for each person, but the Shadows were under very specific orders to work as quickly and unabashedly as they could. The five pieces of impounded contraband had their sharp edges removed and their criminal markings filed off so they could be polished into more practical and appealing tools owned by the Palace.

The low hum of electrical processors was replaced by the sounds of rising steam and sprinkling water. The Garderobes then made a noise like five giant hair dryers going at full blast. There was a brilliant flash inside each tent, like the bulb going off inside a photo booth. A second later, the silhouettes behind the curtains began to move.

The Phantom Thieves sluggishly staggered to their feet as the sheets were raised and they were released from their electromagnetic jail cells. Their skin was dripping with sweat, distilled shower water, and leftover metal particles. Each one wore the same impersonal but logical expression on his or her face, completely unconcerned with the fact they were a set of nude mannequins surrounded by machines that could easily level them. Their appearances said they were human, but their subtle mannerisms made them seem more like machines themselves.

They stood waiting to be instructed what to do next. Timers hardcoded into their cognitive pulses caused them to blink in slightly different intervals, providing the only means of telling them apart aside from the fully revealed features of their bodies. Their Phantom Thief costumes (and their right to wear clothes in general) would be reinstated once they passed the Provisional phase. There were extensive physical and mental tests they still had to complete before they could be considered criminally reformed. The robot Shadows were assembled from materials with exact mechanical limits that could be easily monitored. These ungraded sacks of muscle, fat, and bone had been confiscated as-is, and would have to be tested inside and out in order to measure their limitations.

"New admissions, Dumping Plant," Futaba sternly said to the five, motioning toward Noah with her thumb. The back of the warden opened like the doors of a garbage truck and lowered a ramp to the ground. There were two long transport benches on either sides of its rugged interior.

"Affirmative," the Thieves answered together in a small chorus of relaxed but empty voices.

The naked prisoners walked into the transport in orderly single file and silently took their seats. Futaba gave Noir a friendly smack on the rump as she climbed in last. The lite-minded and discount-bodied Noir stopped in her tracks like a program struck by an unexpected error. She peeked over her damp shoulder toward Futaba, a hint of muted embarrassment and anger on her face. Futaba playfully waved the fingers of one hand like she had cat claws. Noir silently resumed her climb and took her seat with her fellow expedited bio-procurements.

Futaba sealed the oversized trash bin from the outside and knocked her fist twice against the lid. The automated transport took to the air again and left the vault, followed by the rest of its Shadow flock.

Futaba was left by herself at the door of the vault. The Shadows had cleaned up the criminals in merciless and irrevocable ways. Now all she had to do was clean up the crime scene.

* * *

 _Author's note: Wu Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with._

 _Author's note 2: I still haven't had a chance to play my copy of Persona 5. I'm just working with what I know about the story and themes, so this may not be something that makes any sense in the game._

 _Author's note 3: The more I think about it, the more I feel like I just finished writing a really screwed up inverted Power Rangers origin story. So if this doesn't work as a Persona 5 fanfic, I guess it still has that going for it.  
_


	4. Film Noir

" _So, two Gundams oppose me. Me, the vessel filled with the collective will of the people."_

\- Full Frontal, Gundam Unicorn

" _Booker T, let me axe you a question."_

\- Bret Hart, WCW

" _Mwahahahaha."_

\- The Green Ranger, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

* * *

"What's the matter, Futaba? Cat got your tongue?" Noir's voice giggled in small, frantic breaths. Her fingers wrapped tightly around the pole of her axe so it wouldn't slip out of place.

The Palace of Orderly Responsibility had fallen into a frenzy of vicious chaos. The chandeliers were blazing bright red. The floors were awash with savage brutality. The intercom played a pounding synth beat with a zoned out female vocalist mumbling something about making the music louder. The butchered corpses of the Phantom Thieves were strewn through the hall like a tornado had swept through an opera house. Someone's severed arm was lying in a corner. A mangled body with a hacked apart ribcage was on full display over here. A couple of severed heads rolled down the carpet over there. The once posh and regal Palace had turned into the set of a sci-fi slasher movie that wasn't Alien or Jason X.

Only two Phantom Thieves still had a heartbeat. They were standing amidst the carnage like two queens from opposing ends of a bloody chess board. Panther's red catsuit made her silhouette almost become consumed in the nightmarish world surrounding her. Noir stood out with solid her black and violet musketeer profile against the Palace's glaring crimson halls.

Haru Okumura. Teenage schoolgirl. Successful restaurant heir. Gardening fan. Friend. Cybernetically conditioned axe murderess. A little too much hair fluff had grown into Haru's brain and crossed wires with her behavior reprogramming, giving birth to one very emotionally unhinged Palace servant. She now operated under the wicked philosophy that being a "Phantom Thief" meant you ran around stealing everyone's souls. Turning a convict with superhuman powers into a vessel for bureaucratic Shadow AI could lead to some nasty unintended glitches, it seemed.

Panther was standing with an axe shoved through her stomach. Her pigtails were slightly disheveled and her intestines were hacked up like remnants of a strawberry smoothie at the bottom of a blender. Her life was dripping out on to the floor in front of her. The wet red leather texture of her Phantom Thief costume helped hide a lot of the mess, but it wasn't exactly what most respectable felines considered a "tummy rub."

"How… how did you know?" Panther gasped with blood pouring down her mouth. Hearing Noir call her by her real name left her so shocked that the chill creeping up her spine overtook the pain in her gut.

"Just a magic trick." Noir shrugged innocently.

"How can you be doing this?" Panther demanded to know. "I owned your butt! I put you through the electron shower with everyone else! You're just a security doll now! A data dumpster! There shouldn't enough neurons left in there for you to even recognize me!"

"Baby got back," Noir whispered with a demented smirk.

"You filthy rotten little hus-…" Panther started to growl.

Noir thrust the pole of her axe downward, bringing up the bladed end like a lever and splitting Anne-turned-Futaba's body open from her waist to her right shoulder. Panther stumbled backwards spraying a bloody arch and toppled over dead.

"Takes one to know one," Noir said as she flicked her tongue. Her gloved hand brushed away a bit of blood spatter from her cheek.

Noir playfully twirled her axe and let the pole rest against her hip. Her eyes were maniacal and wild under her mask. Her posture was limp and lopsided from the weight of her weapon, almost like she was standing in a trance. The malfunctioning neural pulses in her brain blinked on and off as they tried to decide who or what they should go wrecking next.

Noir started to giggle again. Her giggling rose and broke into mindless hysteria. She stood alone in the scene of carnage she had created, filling the halls of the Palace with high-pitched diabolical laughter.

* * *

 _Author's note: "Collective will of the people" in this case translates to "That one guy from a few months back who wanted this to be a more Haru-centric fic." You willed it, so you got it._

 _Author's note 2: I was stuck between describing her as a musketeer or a highwayman. Musketeer works better I guess._

 _Author's note 3: I bet Elton John told her he didn't want to be the feather in her cap and she killed him._

 _Author's note 4: Do you remember that part in Alien when the critter just kinda reaches out to give the guy a hug? What was that all about?_


End file.
